The Conservative Education Society has a relatively small, but very experienced, membership. We meet in a Lords committee room, and on Monday last week were addressed by Will Quince MP, Children’s Minister, who had been hung out to dry by Boris Johnson on Monday morning’s media round. The Society observes Chatham House rules, so I cannot report what he said, but it was by some way the best informed, most practical and dynamic presentation I have ever heard from an education Minister. The contrast with some of Michael Gove’s successors as a Secretary of State, who have known nothing at all about education, and made their professional supporters cringe with embarrassment, could not have been greater.
This made Quince’s principled resignation the next morning more of a shock and more of a loss. Provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is a mess, and the government review, of which he had the final cut, pulled no punches. Two examples of nine year olds from my own work with parents – one assessed as having a mental illness related to demand avoidance who has a year’s wait to see a psychiatrist, and another experiencing severe anxiety and refusing to attend school, despite her parents’ sustained efforts, whose absences are marked as unauthorised, and whose parents are threatened with prosecution.
SEND is by no means the only mess, or even the biggest one. We rightly criticise our opponents for basing policies on ideology, but we have some of our own, and it is doing damage. When Katharine Birbalsingh stood up and told the truth about London schools in 2010 I stood up and cheered – in my living room – and my admiration has grown over the years. Here was opportunity, an alternative to the dead hand of local authorities and what Michael Gove accurately described as “the soft tyranny of low expectations.” Alas, through the influence of Dominic Cummings, some schools were placed in the hands of incompetents, and the academy trust system that replaced them has many of the vices of local authorities, with an added whiff of corruption. It is also extremely expensive. To pay for it, while meeting George Osborne’s requirement of cuts in overall expenditure, provision in further education and in sixth forms was slashed, denying opportunities to pupils whose parents could not afford private education.
The policy of making every school an academy, and now part of a Multi-Academy Trust, was conceived before the 2010 election, but only admitted publicly some years later. It culminated in Nadhim Zahawi’s ill-fated Schools Bill, one of the rare occasions on which the Lords have exercised their powers reasonably and responsibly. Some of the most successful schools in the country are threatened with compulsory incorporation into these organisations. Some are good, but too many have authoritarian managers who think that making their word law constitutes good leadership. To put these people in charge of some of the most distinguished headteachers we have is simply unacceptable, and it must not be allowed to happen. This is wrong and must be stopped.
Smaller scandals also have their origins in neoliberal ideology. It is now accepted that the allocation of the national tuition project to an organisation without experience in the field, on the grounds that they could pay lower wages, was farcical as well as damaging. The refusal to allow local authorities to build their own schools to meet local need, including SEND schools, is anti-social, inefficient and ruinously expensive, saddling councils with fees of hundreds of thousands of pounds for individual students, with no guarantee of quality. Imposing cuts in inspection while introducing new developments was both irresponsible and a false economy – see the failure of Stantonbury Campuses under a MAT leadership, which is very good at trumpeting its “values”. The privatised exam boards, whatever their technical label, have earned an appalling reputation for arbitrary decisions, unfair competition, and cost-cutting at the expense of quality.
Finally undoing the good work of dismantling Labour’s quangos, only to create another one, five times as big, in the Education Endowment Foundation, is plain old-fashioned folly. It duplicates the work of the National Foundation for Educational Research, has a website that mimicks the format of Trip Adviser Reviews, and is very, very expensive. Nothing neoliberal about that.
Many of us rejoiced in 2010 that we would have an education department again, rather than a New Labour thinktank. We at last had a chance to tackle the errors that had beset education since Labour’s botched introduction of comprehensive schools in the 60s. Whatever the outcome of the next election, that opportunity is now in serious jeopardy. Michelle Donelan is manifestly more experienced in education than James Cleverly, and should be restored to office forthwith. We can do without another Secretary of State who doesn’t know the work.